Scandal

The Temptation of Tiger Woods: Part II: Losing Control

Team Tiger, created to market and protect the young golf phenomenon, was used to saying “No.” But when Tiger Woods’s lies came home to roost, last November, and the stonewalling began, his mistresses started saying "Yes," hawking their own pieces of the champion. Interviewing three more of the women involved, and zeroing in on the love affair that touched off the scandal, Mark Seal reveals the depth of Woods's need—for escape, constant reassurance, and extreme sex—and the price he paid.

Tiger Woods and his wife, Elin Nordegren, spent last Thanksgiving together in their home in the gated community of Isleworth, in Windermere, Florida. Woods had recently returned from winning the Australian Masters. His mother, Kultida, was holidaying with the couple and their two children. Right around the corner from their house, on a rack in Albertsons grocery store, the latest edition of The National Enquirer bore the headline tiger woods cheating scandal. "With This Woman," the cover line continued, and an arrow pointed to a picture of an attractive, pouty-lipped brunette. The article stated:

Sources tell The enquirer that the multimillionaire golf superstar has been recently involved with New York City party girl Rachel Uchitel, a 34-year-old brunette with a reputation for dating married celebrities!

And friends of Rachel say that she's spilled all the steamy details—telling people close to her that she's having a jet-set liaison with 33-year-old Tiger that began in June in New York and has played out in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Australia.

Friends say Rachel told them that she and Tiger stay in touch during his frequent travels through phone calls and "sexting," sending each other racy text messages on their cell phones.

The drama that followed would be parodied everywhere from Saturday Night Live to South Park. The latter portrayed a video game of Woods and his wife in a violent confrontation ending with Elin's smashing their holiday table with a 9-iron before driving it across her husband's face; cursing her, Woods flees as she flails away at him with the golf club until he escapes in his car, with Elin hot on his tail.

"There has never been an episode of domestic violence in our marriage, ever," Woods angrily declared when he made his public apology, on February 19, nearly three months later. But something clearly drove him out of his house at about two a.m. on November 27. He went outside in his bare feet, still feeling the effects of the Vicodin he had taken, and managed to climb into his 2009 Escalade. His destination remains uncertain, but his route is known. According to the Florida Highway Patrol report, he pulled out of his driveway and headed east down the road in front of his house. Going about 30 miles per hour, he drove over a raised median, bounced off two curbs, plowed into a row of shrubbery, hit a fire hydrant, and finally collided with a tree. The ride was only 150 feet, but the crash woke up Woods's neighbors, who hurried to the accident scene. There, on the ground, they found the golf legend sprawled out on his back, unconscious, with blood on his lip. His wife, wearing a black jogging suit, was standing over him.

"Can you help me?" she asked repeatedly.

"It's Tiger! Dial 911!" one of the neighbors cried.

Reporters and comics would later speculate that Nordegren had chased her husband out of the house and broken the rear windows of his car in order to get at him. But Nordegren told police that, upon hearing the crash, she had climbed into a golf cart and rushed to investigate. Finding Tiger behind the wheel, she grabbed a golf club from the cart, smashed the windows of the car, and rescued him. She walked him away from the wreckage, she said, and he leaned on her before falling down. When the police arrived, they found Woods on the ground, covered in a blanket with a pillow under his head.

"He was unconscious and unresponsive," read the police report. An officer tried to revive him with a "knuckle rub," a brisk stimulus to the sternum used to restore consciousness, and Woods "attempted to sit up and mumbled." The police checked his breath and found no evidence of alcohol. An officer asked Nordegren if he had been drinking. No, she said, but added that he had taken his medication earlier. She went into the house and returned with two prescription bottles of Vicodin.

Before paramedics loaded Woods into a Health Central Hospital ambulance, Nordegren retrieved shoes and socks for her husband. Then she was told that she could not ride in the ambulance. "It's domestic," one of the paramedics said, meaning a domestic dispute. "The wife (Elin Woods) could not ride with them because it was a domestic incident," Corporal Thomas R. Dewitt wrote in his report, which, when it was released, nearly four months later, included the caveat that an officer at the accident "did not know where they got that information from because he had never heard that from anyone at the scene of the crash."

What happened after the accident could serve as a public-relations primer of what not to do in such a situation. The investigators wanted to speak to Woods, but he had already been treated and released when they arrived at Health Central Hospital around 4:30 p.m. that Friday. The officers asked the on-duty director of nursing if blood had been drawn from Woods. She said she couldn't answer the question, because "the medical records department was closed and none of the admitting staff were still present from when [Woods] was admitted," according to the police report. Records would not be available until the following Monday.

At 5:55 p.m. on Friday, investigators went to Woods's home to talk to him. Nordegren met them. "Mrs. Woods appeared tired," wrote Corporal Dewitt. When they asked to speak with Tiger, she told them he was asleep. She added that he could not be wakened.

The investigators then asked if she would speak with them, and she said not without her husband present. They asked when they could return to speak with Tiger, and she said the following afternoon at three. Then Nordegren turned and walked off down a hallway, leaving the two officers standing alone. "We let ourselves out," wrote Corporal Dewitt.

As the investigators pulled up to the Woods home the next afternoon at 3:44 p.m., they got a call from Mark Steinberg, Woods's agent at IMG Worldwide. "[Woods] did not feel well and was sick and … wanted to reschedule the interview," Corporal Dewitt wrote. Steinberg came out to the driveway to assure them that Tiger and his wife would speak with them at three the next day. But the next day the police were contacted by Mark NeJame, an Orlando defense attorney, to say that Tiger and Elin would not be meeting with them after all. However, NeJame added, he would provide them with a copy of his client's driver's license, auto registration, and insurance card.

When the investigators met the lawyer at Woods's residence to get the documents, they asked for a copy of the surveillance video from the four security cameras installed around the Woods estate. One of the cameras must have caught the accident that played out in front of it.

The attorney said that he would have to check with the family. A few minutes later he returned, according to Corporal Dewitt's report, which reads: "They did not know if the cameras worked and couldn't figure out how to get the video. He stated they looked at monitors, but nothing was on the screen and didn't know if they needed lights for the cameras to work. NeJame promised to call us back in a couple of hours with the information on any video."

NeJame never called. Instead, he had an associate phone to say that they were as yet unable to retrieve any video.

By the Monday after the crash, reports of the accident were all over the media, including the fact that Woods's representatives weren't cooperating with investigators. Corporal Dewitt received an angry call from NeJame, who was, according to the police report, "concerned and upset by the news reports that his client would not talk with me and Sergeant Britt." Dewitt then asked NeJame if he had gotten any video from the security cameras showing the crash, and the answer was no.

That morning, investigators returned to the hospital to see if blood samples had been taken from Woods when he was admitted. According to the police report, the medical-records director said the hospital couldn't provide that information without a warrant. On November 30, a Request for Investigative Subpoena was filed in the office of Florida's state attorney for the Ninth Circuit. "Crime suspected: Driving Under the Influence with Property Damage," read the request, which sought "medical blood results." That request was promptly denied, owing to "insufficient information provided to lawfully issue subpoena."

With no blood work, no surveillance videos, no statement from the husband or the wife, and no explanation of much of anything, it was beginning to look as if Tiger Woods's accident had never happened. On December 1, the Florida Highway Patrol issued a Uniform Traffic Citation to Eldrick Tiger Woods for a "non-criminal traffic violation," along with a fine of $164 and four points on his license, and the case was officially closed.

But it was just opening for a squadron of women who were about to come forward with shocking stories of their relations with Tiger Woods.

Kid Stuff

Over the 12 years he has represented Woods, Mark Steinberg has become well known for saying no: No to the Florida Highway Patrol investigators after his client's Thanksgiving accident. No to writers requesting interviews with Woods before the scandal, including the veteran Golf Digest columnist Dan Jenkins. ("We have nothing to gain," Steinberg told Jenkins.) No to The New York Times, when a reporter contacted Steinberg last December, after Woods was linked to a case involving Dr. Anthony Galea, who was being investigated by federal prosecutors for allegedly providing athletes with performance-enhancing drugs. "I would really ask that you guys don't write this?," Steinberg e‑mailed the paper. "If Tiger is not implicated, and won't be, let's please give the kid a break."

The word "kid" is telling, because Woods in many ways remains the prodigy who was trained from childhood to master the art of golf and the fame that went with it. When Steinberg joined the group of advisers known as Team Tiger, in 1998, Woods was 22, but he was still very much the cosseted son of extremely controlling parents.

"Where were you born, Tiger?," Earl Woods was quoted by Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated as asking his son when the boy was three.

"I was born on December 30, 1975, in Long Beach, California."

"No, Tiger, only answer the question you were asked. It's important to prepare yourself for this. Try again."

"I was born in Long Beach, California."

"Good, Tiger, good."

"Earl Woods may have ingrained confidence in his son, but Mom provided a ruthless killer instinct," Tod Leonard wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2006. "Tiger confirms as much: 'Mom beat the hell out of my ass. I've still got the handprints.' Tida told him, 'Go after them; kill them. When you're finished, it's sportsmanship. Before that, go for the throat. Don't let that opponent up.'" Kultida was quoted as having once said of her husband, Earl, "Old man is soft. He cry. He forgive people. Not me. I don't forgive anybody." That included her son. "When Tiger was a kid, Tida says she told him, 'You will never ruin my reputation because I will beat you,'" according to the article.

As Tiger achieved stardom, his handlers continued to hone the brand. "We knew that the Tiger being created by his image makers at IMG, Nike, and Titleist was a lot different from the Tiger who signed autographs only once in a while, who rarely spoke to his amateur playing partners or even to the little kids carrying the traveling scoreboards around the golf course," wrote John Feinstein in The First Coming, his 1998 book about Woods and his burgeoning business empire. "We knew that Tiger turned on the thousand-watt smile whenever a TV camera was around but could be short and surly with those he didn't deem important." Feinstein mentioned Woods's and his handlers' insistence on closing the locker room to the media after one of Woods's important early victories, only to be told by an official, "The locker room has been open on this tour for [Arnold] Palmer, for [Jack] Nicklaus, for [Tom] Watson, and everyone else It's open for this kid too. He's not the fifth Beatle."

"Of course he wasn't," Feinstein added. "Earl [Woods] and [Tiger's then IMG agent Hughes] Norton never would have agreed to share billing."

I learn more about Woods the kid from Cori Rist, who is referred to in the tabloids as Tiger Woods Mistress No. 6. The first time I e-mail her, she replies that she is in church. I show up an hour early for our interview and find her walking her son to school. When we finally sit down, in the lobby of her downtown–New York apartment building, the shapely 31-year-old blonde, in a formfitting sweater and tight jeans, tells me that she once worked on Wall Street, but then admits that during her divorce she supported herself and her son by dancing as an exotic entertainer with the name Louella at the Penthouse Executive Club, on Manhattan's West Side. She adds that suggestions by her ex-husband that she also worked as an escort are untrue.

Rist says she fell in love with Woods the same way the whole world did. "Look at his smile," she says. "He's a really nice person, other than what he was doing is completely wrong. So you fall in love with that charm. He had that image where you almost want to believe anything that comes out of his mouth."

She met Woods in the summer of 2006, one night when she was partying at Butter, the Manhattan restaurant and club, with some girlfriends. A man who identified himself as Woods's physical trainer came up and told her, "Tiger would like to meet you." Rist tells me, "So we went over, and Tiger scooted over. I sat down right next to him, and he immediately started telling me jokes." According to Rist, he repeated one he had earlier regretted telling in front of a reporter for GQ back in 1997. Putting the tips of his shoes together and moving his feet up and down, he asked, "What's this?" Then he said, laughing, "A black guy taking off his condom."

After a few drinks, Woods invited Rist to continue the party at the uptown apartment of a superstar ballplayer, where Woods had his own room. He said he would have to get up early to appear on some TV shows, but when he retired, at about two a.m., he took Rist by the hand and led her to his room. The sex was "passionate—fireworks," she tells me. Then came a series of text messages, followed by nights in his friend's apartment or at hotels, including the W New York–Union Square, where he would book a suite. "We slept on my side," she says. "We'd watch TV and hang out on his side. But he was really weird about me sleeping in his bed. Maybe it was a wife thing. Maybe if she called or if someone came in, they would see us together."

As their affair intensified, she discovered more and more of the child in him, from a favorite food—Froot Loops—to his taste in television. "He would sit with his bowl of cereal and watch cartoons," she says. "He spoke a lot about his dad—the pain that he felt from losing him, and how his father was so disciplined with him and made him the man he is today."

He stayed in constant contact by phone and text. She knew all about possessive men, she says, including those who, when she was working at the Penthouse Executive Club, would pay her $5,000 just to dance exclusively for them all night. But Tiger's behavior was off the charts. "He was very jealous, and from the moment I'd wake up, he'd be texting: 'Who's with you? Are you alone?' It was almost like high school, when you call someone all the time: 'Where are you? How do you feel about me?' He needed constant attention and reassurance."

The Tiger Industry

From the start, in his public persona, Woods exuded a sense of absolute control, encouraged by IMG, which "had every intention of milking Tiger for every penny it could," according to John Feinstein. Mark Steinberg had taken over the Woods franchise from Hughes Norton, whose agenting prowess and outsize ego earned him the nickname Huge. The very mention of Norton's name, Tim Rosaforte wrote in Golf World, in March 1998, would call forth some choice expletives:

"Hughes Norton? I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire."

"Turn off the tape recorder."

"[Bleep] Hughes Norton."

Rosaforte added:

An awful lot of people in the golf community would like to "bleep" Hughes Norton: agents who say he stole clients from them; players he discarded like old lovers; executives who say he double-crossed them;

and dozens of others who made the mistake of turning their back on him a second too soon. They'd all like to bleep him, but they can't. Norton, 50, manages Tiger Woods.

(Norton could not be reached for comment.)

Norton eventually got too huge, it would seem, especially for Earl Woods. On October 13, 1998, Tiger's reps confirmed that Norton was out. "The decision came down to a fundamental difference," Tiger's father said. "For Hughes, the dollar is almighty. For Tiger, money is not that important. And Hughes underestimated Tiger's personal growth and his grasp of his own business."

Mark Steinberg was chosen to be the agent for the golden franchise. "Mark is a very egotistical, pompous, standoffish individual, and he treated the media and others in golf pretty much the same way. Because he had Tiger Woods, he was elevated to a position of importance," says one insider. "Mark Steinberg built up a fortress around Tiger, this impenetrable image to make Tiger seem superhuman," says another. The superhuman image sold incredibly well, but it had to be wholesome, above reproach. (Steinberg did not respond to requests for comment.)

Woods joined Steinberg in his habit of saying no. He could get very tough whenever he thought his privacy was being invaded. "Oh, my God, it was pretty intense; he accused me of all sorts of things," Adrian Gardiner, founder of the Shamwari Game Reserve, in South Africa, tells me of Woods's attack on him in 2003 when Woods believed Gardiner had leaked details of the golfer's engagement to Elin Nordegren there. "He promised to protect my privacy … but went back on his word," Woods wrote on his Web site. (Gardiner denied leaking news of the engagement and said he went to great lengths to protect Woods's privacy.)

tiger sues for yachts of $$, read a 2004 New York Post headline after Woods sued Christensen Shipyards for compensatory damages of as much as $50 million, for allegedly using his name and distributing photographs of his $20 million yacht, Privacy. (The company reportedly settled the suit for $1.6 million.)

Before Woods's marriage, an Internet site in 2002 posted photographs of a nude blonde incorrectly identified as Nordegren. Woods wrote on TigerWoods.com, "Although she has done some swimsuit modeling, she has never posed nude, nor does she have any intent to do so."

If Norton had made Woods rich, landing $120 million in endorsement deals with such companies as Titleist, Nike, American Express, Rolex, and General Mills, Steinberg would make him a billionaire. By 2003, he had negotiated multi-year deals for Tiger that reportedly included a $105 million contract extension with Nike (then believed to be the largest ever signed by an athlete), a $2-million-a-year contract with the watchmaker tag Heuer, and a $7-million-a-year deal with the global consulting company Accenture ("Go on. Be a Tiger," read one Accenture ad). He also signed Woods for a deal worth from $20 to $25 million with Buick as other giants of industry lined up to kiss his ring. "I am the global head of all of IMG's golf business, and have 155 people all around the world," Steinberg said in a 2007 interview.

Steinberg had earlier told an audience at the Wharton School that he didn't consider himself a mere agent, but rather "the C.E.O. of a corporation" whose job included developing and protecting the Woods brand. "Coca-Cola, Kodak, Nike—those are three of the largest international brands," Steinberg said. "Tiger Woods is on a par with them. You can't walk down a street in Kuala Lumpur or New Zealand and say 'Tiger Woods,' and not get a response."

Once the details of Woods's Thanksgiving smashup surfaced, along with the shocking revelations that came in its aftermath, some of his sponsors began running for cover. In December, Accenture, having determined "he is no longer the right representative for [our] advertising," dropped him; AT&T pulled the plug shortly after that; Pepsico's Gatorade, having earlier discontinued its Tiger Woods sports drink, ended its business relationship with him, announcing, "We no longer see a role for Tiger in our marketing efforts."

As the endorsers pulled out, the women who said they had had affairs with Woods began marching in. Their relationships with him were worth something, many realized, so they launched into their own marketing campaigns.

The Text Messenger

Do you think Tiger Woods is a sex addict?," I ask Veronica Siwik-Daniels, 32, an adult-film star whose professional name is Joslyn James. "No, I think he's a lying addict," she replies. "I don't know if it's not being able to tell the truth or not being able to accept the truth. He's just living in a fantasy bubble of Mr. All-American, Mr. Act-So-Perfect—you know, 'I can do no wrong.' That's not him. Everybody's got flaws. We all mess up."

The day before our meeting, Siwik-Daniels had trumped all of the golfer's other mistresses by releasing 122 of what she said were more than 1,000 text messages she had received from him during their three-year affair. Some of the texts, which she posted on her Web site, gave explicit details about trysts in hotel rooms around the country, with dates that corresponded to Woods's appearances at prestigious tournaments, including the Buick Open and the Barclays and Deutsche Bank championships. Excerpts were soon reprinted worldwide: "I would like to have a threesome with you and another girl you trust." "Where do you want to be bitten." "I know you have tried every position imaginable but what turns you on."

Siwik-Daniels had starred in such films as Porn Star Brides and Top Heavy 4. After the publicity surrounding Woods's accident, she was ready to reap some mainstream recognition. Her Web site, she says, is just the first step in what seems to be a multifaceted business plan.

Her relationship with Tiger went deeper than sex, Siwik-Daniels tells me, and to prove it she points to two texts from him: "Great thing is we have a life time of this." "You please me like no other has or ever will. I'm not losing that."

I interview Siwik-Daniels in the Van Nuys, California, residence of her manager, which is down the street from the Van Nuys airport, where the famous farewell scene in Casablanca was filmed, in 1942, and she almost seems to be channeling Ingrid Bergman. Dressed in a jet-black jacket and black capri pants, her double-D breasts stretching the limits of her white spangled top, she bids me a sultry hello from beneath a large hat similar to one Bergman wears in the film.

She was living in Las Vegas when she met Woods. She had moved there in 2005 from Seattle with her five-year-old son, hoping to get on the reality-TV show Caesars 24/7, which featured dancers in the Shadow lounge of Caesars Palace. "I went down, auditioned, and got the job," she says. Toward the end of her first year in Vegas, she accompanied a friend to the set of a porn film the friend had landed a role in. When it came time for the star to perform "just a regular blowjob scene," the woman froze. Siwik-Daniels was asked if she could do it, and she said, "You're kidding, right? O.K., sure." She soon became Joslyn James, in a career that would include 20 adult films and regular Internet porn-site appearances.

She ran into Woods while working as "eye candy" at a golf tournament, one of several women hired to wear skimpy outfits and serve as girl caddies in order to add some sex appeal to the game. "I thought he was a dickhead—really full of himself," she remembers. Not long after, she saw him again, while working as a go-go dancer and shot girl at nightclubs in the Bellagio and the Mirage. "He was one of our frequent fliers, as we called them, one of the high rollers who came into the club on a frequent basis, with other athletes—Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, his little posse." That time Woods took notice and sent various emissaries to invite her to join him at his table. When she initially rejected the invitation, he seemed to want her all the more. She finally relented. "He was really funny," she tells me, "cracking dirty Little Johnny jokes."

She had so much fun, she says, that when Woods invited her to his suite at the Mansion at the MGM Grand, she accepted. Of their first night together, she says with a smile, "It wasn't anything that was over the top or boring. I guess other people would say it was a little bit freaky." "Why?," I ask her. "Because we had anal sex. He asked me if I did anything else outside of working in the nightclub, and I said, 'Yes, I work in the adult-film industry.' He goes, 'You do? What's your name?'" She teasingly refused to tell him. When Woods woke the next morning, he said, "I want you to have all my numbers," and before she even got to her car, she says, "he was texting me."

Woods flew her to Chicago, Washington, D.C., Georgia, and the Carolinas, and she tutored him in the ways of extreme sex. She says Woods became so obsessed with her porn films and Internet appearances that he insisted she quit the business, because he couldn't bear to watch her have sex with another man. (She says she did quit, but after the scandal she returned to the adult-film industry and the strip-club stage.) She claims that she became pregnant twice by Woods, the first instance ending in a miscarriage, the second in an abortion after she became convinced that he was cheating on her—and not with his wife.

She had heard about other women through the Vegas grapevine, but she became certain during her last tryst with Woods, at the Mansion last October. He had told her that he had a very important meeting with investors and his agent, and that he would text her when he was returning to the room so that she could split and nobody would see her. But he apparently forgot to text her, and he seemed surprised to find her still in his suite. "At the Mansion you have your own elevator that goes to your room, and I was sitting in an entertainment area, and he came off the elevator and walked past me," she says. "He said, 'They're going to be coming up pretty soon. I'm going to jump in the shower, and I'll talk to you later.'"

She left, but soon she received some blistering texts from him: "Oh my god. If they were with me, you would have ruined everything. I can't believe what just happened. Don't fucking talk to me. You almost just ruined my whole life. If my agent and these guys would have seen you there, fuck."

Siwik-Daniels says, "I was hurt and upset, and after all this stuff came out I was starting to think, Did he really have the investors with him? Was his agent really with him? Or was it because he had another girl? I think he had another girl on the way."

The Poster Girl

Rachel Uchitel was a child of New York nightclub royalty, if you can call it that. Her grandfather Maurice Uchitel was a Ukrainian-born Jew who used the fortune he had made selling canvas linings and shoulder pads for men's suits to have some fun. He married a Broadway singer named Patricia Pollack, and the couple wintered in Acapulco, Palm Springs, and Beverly Hills. Legend has it that once, when he was unable to obtain a reservation at the Eden Roc hotel, in Miami Beach, Uchitel bought the place. In 1966 he took over El Morocco, the Manhattan nightclub. "As the owners and hosts of El Morocco, Maurice and Pat Uchitel became two of the best-known personalities in the city, close friends of politicians like Robert Kennedy and famous regulars like Cary Grant, Ed Sullivan, and Douglas Fairbanks," says a friend. Before Maurice's death, in 2000, he and his brother, Hy, bought the Place for Steak, in Miami. Suzan Lewis, alleged biological daughter of the comedian Jerry Lewis and Hy Uchitel's stepdaughter, recently wrote, "Hy and his brother Maurice Uchitel had many other enterprises, and it was rumored that they were connected with 'the syndicate,' but they never spoke about that."

The Uchitels had one son, Bob, who married a TV actress named Susan Bishop. In 1972 the couple moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where their daughter, Rachel, was born. Bob struck it rich in the construction and cable-TV booms, only to descend into what the Anchorage Daily News called "a Howard Hughes existence." On November 11, 1990, the paper reported:

The police found only one body, but ask Bob Uchitel's friends, they'll tell you two Bobs died that day. The old Bob was a strong man, a man of vision and intellect, a self-made Alaska millionaire The new Bob died alone at his Anchorage home on September 30, 1990, his body bruised and bloody, his brain cooked on cocaine.

Rachel Uchitel grew up in style, went to a fancy private school, and by her mid-20s was working in New York as a television producer at Bloomberg. She was engaged to a Wall Street investment banker named Andy O'Grady, who was in his office on an upper floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11. When the towers fell, Uchitel took to the streets in a white tank top with tears streaming down her face, clutching a poster with pictures of her missing fiancé. Photographers surrounded the stunning young woman, and she was soon seen around the world as the face of New York's grief. "She embodied the empty pain of those who were searching for a relative or a friend," wrote the New York Post in 2002.

In 2004, after undergoing counseling for post-traumatic-stress disorder, she married a stock trader named Steven Ehrenkranz in a fairy-tale wedding, but after four months the couple separated, and Uchitel was lost again. She bought a car, packed up her two dogs, and drove across the country to Las Vegas, where she took up with a childhood friend, nightlife entrepreneur Jason Strauss. He put her to work in a new club called Tao he was opening, in the Venetian hotel. Eventually she rose to V.I.P. host.

The fresh-faced girl who had personified unimaginable loss on the streets of Lower Manhattan blossomed into a vamp with Rapunzel hair and remarkable cleavage. She soon left Strauss and went to work for the Light Group at one of Tao's competitors, the Bank, in the Bellagio. She was next running V.I.P. services at a club called Pink Elephant, in the Hamptons, and one called the Griffin, in New York City. Somewhere along the line, Uchitel raised a velvet rope for Tiger Woods.

Tracking Down the Story

'A lead came our way that this New York party girl named Rachel Uchitel was bragging to some friends that she was involved with Tiger Woods," Barry Levine, executive editor of The National Enquirer, tells me, adding that he initially thought, No way. "Here's Tiger—beautiful young wife, young children," he says. "You may have some gal who might have met him once in a restaurant or club who's trying to impress her friends." On the other hand, though, Levine thought, What if? "This is a man who is a billion-dollar celebrity. He had been passing himself off as a relatively squeaky-clean individual who endorsed family values. Obviously, if there was any truth to the story, I realized right off the bat, it would be huge."

Levine assembled a team of reporters, who began "attempting to cultivate and develop sources around Tiger Woods. Not the easiest thing in the world when you're dealing with a celebrity who's worth a billion dollars, who travels in a very secure and private world of multi-million-dollar yachts and expensive mansions and private planes. Certainly a difficult world to crack. Because when you're worth that much money, you have a tremendous amount of loyalty around you from people who work for you."

Yet here was this Uchitel woman, who, the Enquirer soon learned, was headed for alleged rendezvous with Woods in Australia and Dubai. They checked his schedule: he was indeed playing golf in both places. It was a hell of a lead, Levine tells me, but not solid enough to satisfy the paper's attorneys. "We would have to see things ourselves," says Levine, who dispatched a surveillance team to Melbourne.

"We didn't travel on the same plane with her, but I had a reporter watch her leave her apartment," he continues. He had an advance team installed at the hotel in Melbourne where he had been told Uchitel would be staying, and where, his reporters learned, Woods was also staying. Once their photographer shot Uchitel on the way into the hotel, Levine says, he "was obviously getting excited." But there were two problems. First, another publication, believed to be Us Weekly, had gotten wind of the story, so the Enquirer had to move fast. Second, it was important to catch the couple in Melbourne, because if they got to Dubai all could be lost. "Dubai is a place where we had not operated, and the laws against paparazzi are extremely strict. You aim a camera in somebody's direction and you can have your photographer thrown in jail. We had to bring this to a head to some degree in Australia."

By this time, they were "polygraphing some sources" back in the U.S., "but our sense was we had to see something directly." An Enquirer reporter slipped into the hotel elevator with Uchitel and rode with her up to the 35th floor, where Woods had gotten off after finishing golfing that day. The reporter watched Uchitel walking in the direction of Tiger's suite. "After that, we made the decision to confront her," says Levine. In order not to blow the cover of his reporters, Levine called Uchitel himself. "It's Barry Levine from The National Enquirer, and we know you're over there in Australia for a sexual rendezvous with Tiger Woods, and this isn't the first time," he said. "It's completely false," Levine says Uchitel replied. "Yes, I'm here in Australia. I'm here on business."

"And then she changed the story and said, 'I'm here with my boyfriend.' And then she changed the story again and said, 'I know Tiger Woods. I travel in celebrity circles. And if I'm here and he's here … it just means that we happen to be in the same city.'"

Levine realized she was going into "cover-up mode," which would soon turn into "panic mode," both of which the National Enquirer editor knows well. He told her, "Rachel, we photographed you arriving at the hotel, and you were alone." She hung up. (A source close to the situation says this account is not true.)

At that point, the Enquirer team netted an acquaintance of Uchitel's, a Las Vegas woman named Ashley Samson, a busty blonde who had separated from her husband and moved in with a girlfriend who was a V.I.P. host at one of the nightclubs. One day, Samson told the New York Daily News, her friend asked her, "Hey, you want to go to Spain? My friend Rachel is going to pay for it."

"I'm like, 'Alright, cool. Hell, yeah, I want to go to Spain!'"

Samson said she had thought Uchitel was just another trust-fund baby, paying for friends to join her on vacation. She said she soon realized that they were there to party with four men. She was struck by Uchitel's nonstop texting on her cell phone while the girls rested together before their first night on the town.

"I'm like, 'Girl, who are you texting?' And she's like, 'Tiger.'"

"It's O.K., tell her," Samson said her girlfriend told Rachel.

"I'm dating Tiger Woods," she said Rachel told her.

Uchitel said that she'd met Woods at a New York nightclub where she worked, and that soon he was "blowing up my cell phone with messages!," Samson told the Enquirer. She said Rachel showed her Tiger's texts and let her listen in on their phone conversations. "She read multiple text messages to me," Samson told Radar Online. "One in particular," she recalled, "where Tiger was saying that he wanted to be with her forever She was bragging about it, and she gave us very graphic details."

Uchitel would later tell the New York Daily News via Facebook that there was no affair and that she and Samson weren't even friends. She told the New York Post that Samson was a "train wreck" who traded sex for cash and took quaaludes. Samson publicly accused Uchitel of "destroying my name, making up stories, lying." Barry Levine, meanwhile, knew that he'd hit the jackpot.

"The Enquirer is here," he says Uchitel told Woods, who told her, "Get on the next plane and out of Dodge." (The source close to the situation says that didn't happen.) By then The National Enquirer was ready to publish, and since the tabloid's Monday-night deadline, called "the lockup," was looming, a decision had to be made. They decided to go to Woods for a comment. Levine e-mailed the accrued allegations to Mark Steinberg, who didn't respond. Levine says he soon got word from Woods's Los Angeles attorneys, the notoriously litigious firm of Lavely & Singer, who contended that Tiger had read the *Enquirer'*s e-mailed allegations "and said our story was false."

Levine held the story for a week. Before the deadline for the next edition, which would be out just before Thanksgiving, the *Enquirer'*s sources had passed polygraphs, and the top source, Samson, had agreed to go on the record and turn over photographs of her and Uchitel partying in Spain. Levine admits they paid her for her cooperation, though he declines to confirm the amount (reported to be $25,000, which Samson later said she lamented accepting, after Woods's camp offered her $200,000 not to talk).

They were also able to trace the origin of Uchitel's airline ticket to Melbourne. Levine says, "It had, in fact, been paid for by one of Tiger's companies … and [Woods's close associate] Bryon Bell authorized the ticket." (Bell did not respond to requests for comment.) This amounted to, in Levine's words, "a smoking gun," which would go off in the Woods home a week later, on Thanksgiving. (Rachel Uchitel declined to comment about Woods for this article.)

Gloria Hallelujah

His car crash sent a battered Woods into hiding, and for once Team Tiger's silence, its longtime reliance on saying no, fed the scandal instead of making it disappear.

"How differently would this story have unfolded had an agent or P.R. person said at eight a.m. the next morning, 'Mr. Woods was involved in a minor traffic accident coming out of the driveway of his home,'" Gary Bruhn, mayor of Windermere, Florida, an excitable man in a dark suit and bright tie, tells me, sitting on the stage of the town hall, just down the road from the Woods mansion in Isleworth. "It wouldn't have been a big deal. Instead, nobody from his camp said a word, and it began to grow and grow, and what started as a minor accident—well, it exploded." Bruhn continues: "Two hundred paparazzi and everyone from CBS to CNN to Al Jazeera! Paparazzi hanging from the trees! TMZ wanted to know what golf club Elin used."

When Mark Steinberg finally spoke, two days after the accident, it was via an e-mail that amounted to another no: "Although Tiger realizes that there is a great deal of public curiosity, it has been conveyed to FHP [Florida Highway Patrol] that he simply has nothing more to add and wishes to protect the privacy of his family."

Tiger Woods's long joyride was over. His chorus line of dumped mistresses didn't give a damn about his privacy. He'd had his fun with them, and now many were finally going to get paid for it. The first to extract payment seems to have been Rachel Uchitel.

Under siege by the paparazzi in New York City, Uchitel flew to L.A. to meet with the attorney Gloria Allred, the Al Sharpton of women's-rights cases. "[Gloria Allred] gets many hundreds of calls and e-mails every week from people seeking to have her represent them, and she takes only a tiny number of those, maybe one or two," Lisa Bloom, Allred's daughter and former colleague, tells me. The "classic Gloria Allred case," according to Bloom, is "women who are in some kind of trouble with a high-profile man."

When Uchitel arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, wearing a motorcycle jacket and aviator sunglasses, she and Allred were mobbed. "Hey, sweetie … do you regret what you did?" one photographer yelled. "Do you enjoy being a home wrecker?" demanded another.

When Allred scheduled a press conference for December 3, reporters began salivating. "Gloria's press conferences are always great. Everybody shows up, and usually the girl will cry," says a longtime regular at them. "They're famous in this town. She's the best at what she does—getting maximum publicity for her clients and getting them the best price for their stories." Two nights before the press conference, Allred took her client to dinner at Spago in Beverly Hills. When word got around that the pair were dining in the restaurant, the paparazzi gathered. Soon, Allred emerged, bearing a tin of sweets for them. As the women were leaving in Allred's Mercedes, the photographers flocked around them.

Allred and Uchitel were clearly trolling for Tiger, letting him know that Rachel was prepared to sing unless he sprang into action. While the other mistresses had plenty of tales of sex and sin to tell, Uchitel had Tiger not only by the balls but also, reportedly, by his heartstrings. With her, it wasn't just an affair but a love affair, and she had Woods's e-mail messages to prove it. "I finally found someone I connect with, someone I have never found like this," one allegedly read. "Why didn't we find each other years ago I just wanted you to know what's going on inside me." As Michelle Braun, the madam who says she provided Woods with at least two of his mistresses, explains to me, extramarital sex is a hobby, concerning which she would advise a wife, "Let him go. He's coming home." But extramarital love is a shipwreck from which most marriages never recover.

The message Allred was sending to Woods was evident: If you don't want Rachel to talk, bring in Mr. Green—lawyers' slang for money. The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, was rumored to be offering $250,000 for an exclusive interview with Uchitel for a story tentatively titled "Inside the Tormented Mind of Tiger Woods." Negotiations between Allred and Team Tiger reportedly went on through the night. Early the next morning, the press conference was abruptly canceled. No reason was given, but The Mail on Sunday had presumably been told to take a walk. It seems that there could be only one explanation for the cancellation: Team Tiger and Rachel Uchitel had struck a deal.

Weeks later, I took Allred to lunch at a restaurant near her Los Angeles office. By then she was also representing Veronica Siwik-Daniels. Allred, a diminutive lady with perfectly coiffed hair, was wearing a double-breasted caramel-colored suit with a leopard-print blouse and a bejeweled zebra pin on her shoulder. "Has Tiger's camp paid women, including Rachel Uchitel, for their silence?," I asked her. A full 10 seconds passed while she smiled at me a dozen ways before purring sweetly, "No comment."

Early in March, Allred e-mailed me:

When we had lunch, you asked me if Rachel or any of my clients could not comment because we had made settlements with Tiger. I paused for a moment before answering and you said that you were going to write down that I smiled and then that I said "no comment." I just want you to know that the reason that I smiled is because somewhere in almost every conversation about Tiger that a reporter has with me (when speaking about my client, Veronica) that question pops up and it is only a question of when in the conversation it will appear. I just wanted to provide you with that context, so that my smile would not be misinterpreted.

When I asked Lisa Bloom if Tiger's camp had paid off women, she directed me to what she had said on CBS's The Early Show, where she serves as a legal analyst:

I have never, in all of my mother's career of over 30 years, known her to cancel a press conference. That can only mean one thing: as we say in the law, Mr. Green has arrived. There has to have been a confidential settlement. Tiger Woods's camp, of course, would want confidentiality, as to not only the amount of the settlement, but a promise from Rachel never to talk about her relationship with him. And I would estimate that had to be a very significant amount for my mother to cancel that press conference. I would estimate at least a million dollars. Probably well in excess of a million dollars, given the amounts that are flying around in this case as to his wife and as to the other women.

In April, TMZ reported that Uchitel had been paid about $10 million.

Did Woods and his team really believe that paying her off would end the scandal? Perhaps at that point Woods hadn't revealed the true size of his harem even to his agent and advisers. In any case, there was now blood in the water, and the smell of big money, and very soon the other mistresses began circling.

A Seller's Market

At least 15 women were quickly linked to Tiger Woods, most of them announced by banner headlines and cover stories in the New York Post, in a contest, it seemed, to see which could tell the bawdiest tale about Tiger. Few of the women who surfaced in media reports chose to remain silent. One British woman, a 42-year-old mother of two, whom Woods is said to have squired for 18 months when she worked in an Orlando nightclub, reportedly extracted $500,000 from him to stay mum. Even boyfriends jilted by lovers who had ditched them for Woods were ready to tell all for a price. "My time's not free!" one of them texted me, and two others said essentially the same.

In early December, a woman named Jaimee Bluesky Grubbs briefly rose to the top rung of the ladder. I'd read reports that she had collected $150,000 from tabloids and television shows after she came forward and spoke about her 31-month affair with Woods. (Her manager says the amount was far less.) By the time I contacted her, via Facebook, I was not surprised to find that she wasn't really interested in meeting with me.

"Sorry, but at this point in my life I'm only interested in paid interviews and appearances," she wrote. She went on to suggest various ways I could pay her. For example: "Ask Vanity Fair for a raise, and then pass on the raise to me."

I wrote back, indicating that Vanity Fair has a policy against paying for interviews. She again told me essentially no thanks, adding that she had "paying offers on the table." I sent her one more Facebook message, frankly pleading my case, perhaps a bit too urgently.

Jaimee Grubbs, January 17 at 10:18 a.m.

Mark

Thanks for the email. I'm going to take a pass on your offer while I focus on paid gigs for the next year. I've also decided to write a book on my life—the ups and downs, and the downs and ups. I'll be looking forward to reading your article about Tiger. Everybody has an opinion on him, but he's really just a sweet guy. At any rate—I'm going to include our dialogue, and your offer in my book. My agent thinks it's funny—and it will sell.

Since it seemed I was already contributing to her book, I felt I had a right to try once more. Finally I located her manager, and she persuaded Grubbs to meet with me.

At 10 a.m., Grubbs walks into the patio of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, and is immediately noticed by the breakfasting businessmen, Hollywood types, and tourists. Grubbs, who is part Native American, is tall and thin, with bronze skin, reddish hair, and a diamond stud in her cheek. She seems very different from the other Woods mistresses I have met, but she did appear in the ribald VH1 reality show Tool Academy, in which women attempt to leash the behavior of their loutish boyfriends.

She tells me of her meeting with the great golfer. "It was April 2007. I was just 21 and finally getting to go to Vegas with an actual ID to do everything I wanted to do." She was taking time off from her several jobs in San Diego—cocktail-waitressing, working at real-estate and car companies—and was with four girlfriends, the five of them packed into one hotel room, paying $37 each. On their first night in town, they went to Light, the nightclub in the Bellagio, where they met a V.I.P. host, who brought them drinks and said, "I'll take you over," motioning to a table of mostly middle-aged men.

"I was like, I don't want to sit with a bunch of old guys!," Grubbs says. But she and her friends followed the host and sat down at the table. "Then I get a tap on my shoulder. I turn around and hear this guy say, 'You don't look like you're having fun.' It was Tiger Woods! He was with the old guys."

She was so nervous that she moved away from him, calming her nerves by hanging out with her girlfriends on the other side of the table. "Then he comes back to me and says, 'Oh, somebody's loosening up.'" They hung out, talked, and danced, and later the girls climbed into a limousine with Woods and his friends. They dropped off the girlfriends at their hotel, and Grubbs accepted the men's invitation to go to Woods's suite at the Mansion, where they tried to entice her into joining them in the Jacuzzi. "No offense, but I'm not doing the hot-tub scene with four boys and being the only girl," she told them.

Woods went to bed, and Grubbs dozed off on the couch. When she awoke, it was morning. "Ten minutes later, this woman comes in and was like, 'Are you ready for your massage?' I'd never had a professional massage. I was so excited. It was, like, $400." She says Woods's friend Jerry Chang told her to sign for it—it would be billed to Tiger's room—and to add an extra hundred for the tip. Later, Grubbs says, she went shopping with Chang. "[Tiger] had a Rolls-Royce Phantom that he used for the weekend as his car," she says. She and Chang took it to the mall, where she got a dress. That night, when she had finished partying with her girlfriends, at 3:30 a.m., she called Woods's suite. "A stretch limo came and picked me up." Even that second night, Woods didn't make a move. (Chang did not respond to requests for comment.)

'I woke up the next morning to Tiger saying, 'Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,'" she tells me. He had French toast sent up, and they ate breakfast at the enormous dining-room table—she, Tiger, one of his friends, and "a girl that flew in the night before. It was like a double-date scenario." Woods needed to head out early, but before he left he did something she found endearing. "He hits me on the arm and looks at me and smiles and starts laughing, you know, like an eighth-grader does. Like you hurt the person you have a crush on."

While helping him pack, she pushed him so that he would land on the bed. "And he does a wrestle-cuddle with me." Then he gave her a good-bye kiss and said he'd call her the next time he came to San Diego.

He did, but even then he remained in the schoolmate mode. "He was shy all along," says Grubbs. "Never in a million years would I take him to be a ladies' man." She went to his hotel, the W San Diego, where they mostly watched TV. Woods was fanatical about holding the remote. "The only reason I'm accepting this [her demand to watch Desperate Housewives] is because Teri Hatcher is one of my good friends," he told her. "Other than that, you don't get the remote."

He once told her, "My whole life's like an interview." But with her, he said, he just wanted to hang out and feel free. Finally they had sex. She claims that she didn't yet know he was married. "He never wore a ring," she says. "I started to really emotionally get involved and fall for him." Soon she was getting incessant, intimate text messages from him. In October 2009 he reserved a room for them at Newport Beach's Island Hotel, saying, "It's under the name Bell—Mr. and Mrs. Bryon Bell."

A month after that, on November 24, three days before Woods's accident, she received an urgent voice mail from him: "Can you please take your name off your phone? My wife went through my phone and may be calling you. If you can, please take your name off … and just have it as a number on the voice mail You've got to do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye."

She did as he instructed her. "I wanted to protect him," she says. He called and texted her on Thanksgiving, just a quick "happy thanksgiving to you," to which she replied, "u too love." The next day she got a call from her mother: "Did you hear the latest news? Tiger got in a car crash!"

"I texted him, 'I hope you're O.K. I don't know what I'd ever do if I lost you' type thing. Then I tried to call him, and his phone was disconnected. I thought the car crash could have been because of me His wife had gone through his phone and found out he was seeing me." She adds, "I thought I was the only person he was dating."

Then she heard about Rachel Uchitel. "I was angry. I was sad. I felt betrayed. I felt kind of tossed aside. I didn't really think about that when I told the story. It was kind of something I wanted to get off my chest."

She began talking, at first to friends and family, and then to the media, and if anyone asked for proof, she had it in spades. "I've always been a pack rat," she says. "I saved every stuffed animal that anyone ever got me." She had kept her cell phones, on which she had saved many of the text and voice-mail messages Tiger had sent her. These were released in one devastating article after another.

Grubbs looks up, takes a bite of her breakfast, and shakes her head. "I'm just trying to get back to my normal life I've gone back to work at my cocktailing job. Obviously I am getting some opportunities that I never had before." I say I hear she has landed a nude layout in Playboy, but she says no, it's Maxim—"something that I dreamed of doing as a little girl."

As December turned to January, and Grubbs's fame grew, she didn't hear a word from Tiger or his team. It was as if Tiger Woods had fallen off the face of the earth.

"It's probably easier to find Osama bin Laden than Tiger Woods right now," one sportswriter told me in early January. Then came breaking news from the unlikeliest of places, a town called Hattiesburg, in a remote corner of southern Mississippi.

Finding the Cure

'We had a sighting the other day at the Hattiesburg Country Club: Tiger was playing golf with Elvis," says a C.P.A. in a McDonald's in Hattiesburg, where I've joined the seven-a.m. coffee club of 15 of the town's business and civic leaders, who call themselves "the mean old bastards." Before Woods's arrival Hattiesburg wasn't generally known as a sex-addiction-rehabilitation center. Several of the men in McDonald's still don't even know that there is a soon-to-be-celebrated sex clinic, called the Gentle Path, in their town. "Wasn't that the old Dixie Motel?" one of them asks.

Back in the 1940s, says one longtime local resident, it was a hooker hamlet on the edge of town, where working girls from New Orleans, two hours south, would open up shop and local men would join them in the Dixie's little cottages. In July 2004, the cottages were spiffed up and transformed into lodging and counseling quarters for sex addicts. In spite of widespread rumors, there still wasn't actual proof that Woods was at the Gentle Path, but immediately the sex clinic, set in a scruffy industrial area of auto dealerships and body shops, came under siege.

"A sight to behold," one local marvels at the shocking media onslaught. Paparazzi sneaked onto rooftops, hoping to shoot Tiger in rehab; they offered cash to startled merchants to let them camp out on their property. One enterprising sleuth tried to deliver a stack of pizzas to the sex clinic's front door "for Mr. Woods," only to have the pies thrown in his face. Police slammed one over-aggressive television correspondent against a squad car for trespassing. Finally the clinic erected a six-foot makeshift fence of wood and black plastic sheeting in an attempt to block the thundering horde of reporters.

If that wasn't evidence enough of Woods's presence, a photographer from The National Enquirer soon proved it. "He was living in his car, peeing in a jug," the manager of the Midas auto-repair shop in Hattiesburg drawls. (The *Enquirer'*s editor says, "I know nothing about it.") A photo of the unshaven, ghostlike Woods, staring out from beneath the folds of a black hoodie behind the gates of the Gentle Path, ran in late January in the Enquirer.

After being trailed by a security guard in an S.U.V. for half a day as I interview people working around the Gentle Path, I finally ring the sex clinic's front-door bell. The door is opened by an attractive young woman, and I enter a simple lobby dominated by a portrait I take to be of Dr. Patrick Carnes, the clinic's executive director. I hand the woman my card, and she directs me down the street to the main hospital, of which the Gentle Path is a part. "Ask for a brochure," she says.

"The Gentle Path program offers treatment to aid men and women in regaining their freedom from compulsive sexual behaviors and relationships," according to the brochure, which outlines the six-week "intensive program designed to treat sexual addiction, sexual anorexia, relationship addiction and sexual trauma." The price: "$37,100 for approximately 45 days of treatment."

Reports soon surfaced that Woods was getting V.I.P. treatment at the spartan facility, employing a maid while other patients did housework and made their own beds, residing in a private cabin while others had to share. However, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who has personally gone through treatment at two similar facilities and visited the Gentle Path as part of the research for his book America Anonymous, tells me that's unlikely. "Contrary to the myth of sexual addiction, people come into rehab feeling profound amounts of guilt and shame," he says. He adds that Woods most likely shared group-counseling sessions with fellow patients ranging from obsessive pornography collectors to strip-club habitués, to sexual voyeurs, to serial flashers, to people who, like him, juggle a dozen or more simultaneous affairs. "Many of them are very successful people, who think, How the fuck did I wind up here? You're encouraged to give a full disclosure of your sexual behavior. The whole point of the place is about vigorous, staggering honesty. It's one of the most intense emotional experiences a human being can have." The treatment includes "disclosure day," when patients are urged to confess everything about their sexual escapades to their spouse.

On February 19, Gloria Allred and Veronica Siwik-Daniels are sitting in the conference room of a Los Angeles radio station before a large television screen, surrounded by TV reporters, all ready to go live after Woods makes his first public statement since the Thanksgiving crash. The women have said that they expect Woods to apologize personally to Veronica in his speech.

Siwik-Daniels has her red hair in a short pixie cut, and she is wearing a prim business suit. As Woods begins speaking on the TV screen, her eyes well up. During his extremely circumspect apology, she grips Allred's hand and starts to cry. "It was just bogus!" she tells me later. When Woods's speech ends, with a plea for those who once believed in him "to find room in your heart to one day believe in me again," and he walks off the podium to hug his mother, without issuing an apology to Veronica or any of the other women he has used, Allred gives her client a consoling hug and lets rip: "Today was not an apology; it was a staged public-relations stunt. It was a disgrace. My client deserves better than this. Tiger is hiding behind handlers in a carefully crafted statement. His story line is that he had gone to rehab and has now emerged to make this statement and is now going back to rehab. But the rehab that he needs is not just sex rehab, it is instead lying rehab, betrayal rehab, and he needs a course on how to be honest with the women—or this woman—in his life." She turns to her sobbing client. "Now I'd like to present Veronica for her reaction."

"I would be open to a telephone apology from Tiger," Siwik-Daniels says in a trembling voice, her face wet with tears. "But I really feel that I deserve to look at him, in person, face-to-face, in his eyes, because I didn't deserve this."

The next step in Woods's attempt to regain his stardom came in April, when he returned to golf at the Masters Tournament, at Augusta National Golf Club, finishing in a respectable tie for fourth place. He won the cheers of his fans but the castigation of Augusta chairman Billy Payne, who said in a press conference before the tournament, "Our hero did not live up to the expectations of the role model we saw for our children." Elin Nordegren and the Woods children did not attend the event.

"It's not what you achieve in life that matters; it's what you overcome," Woods said in his public apology. This year marks the 20th anniversary of an infamous incident at Shoal Creek, a private golf club in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Professional Golfers' Association Championship was to be held in 1990. When the club's founder told a local reporter, "We don't discriminate in every other area except the blacks," a furor erupted, and Shoal Creek grudgingly had to admit its first black member. Six years later, Tiger Woods turned pro and drove a golf ball down the throat of that bigotry once and for all. Now he faces an equally enormous challenge: overcoming the worst in himself.